BP Admits Altering Multiple Official Images

BP has acknowledged their practice of photoshopping some of the official images of their Deepwater Horizon clean-up efforts and has vowed to stop manipulating photographs going forward. They've also created a Flickr account where you can see the unaltered originals.

BP told the UK Telegraph that they've issued a new guideline to "refrain from doing (sic) cutting-and-pasting" in the future.

What's galling about the Photoshop jobs - aside from how poorly they were done - is how unnecessary they all are. The command centre looks plenty busy without extra screen images, the helicopter shot is even more captivating when we know that they're on a helipad about to launch (and at the very least explains that looming tower) and the Sim Ops changes are barely noticeable. But by altering the official documentation of the event, BP erodes whatever trust we have in them even further at a time when we need and deserve to know exactly what's going on.

So good for BP on coming clean, on posting the images and on stopping the silly obfuscation. Now let's all get back to the clean-up, the remuneration and all the other things that actually matter. [Telegraph UK]